Markdown Text 101 (Chat Formatting: Bold, Italic, Underline)

Want to inject some flavor into your everyday text chat? You're in luck! Discord uses Markdown, a simple plain text formatting system that'll help you make your sentences stand out. Here's how to do it! Just add a few characters before & after your desired text to change your text! I'll show you some examples...

Sweet Styles

Italics

*italics* or _italics_

Underline italics

__*underline italics*__

Bold

**bold**

Underline bold

__**underline bold**__

Bold Italics

***bold italics***

underline bold italics

__***underline bold italics***__

Underline

__underline__

Strikethrough

~~Strikethrough~~

Don't want to use markdown? You can slap a backslash in front of your statement, and it'll escape the markdown formatting. You'll see those asterisks as you'd like! Just keep in mind, it doesn't work in messages with edits or underscores.

Code Blocks

Discord also supports code blocks as well. You can make your own code blocks by wrapping your text in backticks (`)

You can also use three backticks (```) to create multiline code blocks, like this beautifully written haiku.

If you really want to spruce up your code blocks, you can denote a specific language for syntax highlighting, by typing the name of the language you want the code block to expect right after the first three backticks beginning your code block. An example...

There are many different languages in place of Markdown that Discord's syntax highlighting support. Each different language has its own approach to highlight-able syntax. In Markdown, you can see that here:

And you get the idea! Now you're a Discord text markdown expert. Get out there and highlight your statements!

Comments

"Don't want to use markdown? You can slap a backslash in front of your statement, and it'll escape the markdown formatting. You'll see those asterisks as you'd like!"

This seems to no longer work. I've tried various ways of doing things (before it, after it, inside the markdown, after it, after second markdown but before statement, etc.). Is there a way to make this not do it automatically? ;; I just want to ~*~type pretty things like this~*~

That page can say whatever it wants about "Ingenious". Unfortunately, when most people will say it, it will sound more like "in-gene-ee-ous" than "in-gene-yus". Actually, "yus" will sound like "ee-ous".

Say it out loud. If it's 3 syllables for you, you're the minority, regardless of what that page says.

"How ingenious" is works just fine for a haiku. Get too caught up in it, and you'll just snare yourself.

One-line code blocks don't seem to be working properly for me. I can use the triple backtick blocks, but it is just odd that the one-line ones don't work. If they have been removed, maybe the guide should be updated to reflect the change. If not, I really don't care enough to figure out why.

@Агент the image embed characters aren't really markdown, but I did add them in the image-embed article in the Help center. Webhooks are capable of using extended JSON markdown that isn't normally implemented in text chat because they are code-based.

"Just keep in mind, it doesn't work in messages with edits or underscores." Not exactly sure what this statement meant, but when I made a help channel with a few links and quick tips I was able to display a few examples by escaping every formatting character.